Kamikaze
July 24 - Aug 3, 2002
Kerim Aytac, Justin Coombes, Shun-Lung Chung, Katy Dawkins, Joe Duggan, Sarah Evans, Marc Goodwin, Patrick Kelly, Ilona Karwinska, Hala El Koussy, Francisco Lopez, Evi Peroulaki, Urzula Rapacka, Tomas Stargardter, Doris Vanistendael, Douglas White
| photographic, digital, and time-based media | space 1,2,3 | also at Mafuji Gallery

The sixteen artists in KAMIKAZE play deftly with photography, video, and film. Making serious points flippantly, joking with straight faces, satirizing their subjects without lapsing into irony. Concerns include nature, language, travel, paradise and death. KAMIKAZE pilots takes their ideas to dangerously logical conclusions...

In Douglas White's digitally manipulated photographs, natural forms take on supernatural connotations. Using similar tactics, Francisco Lopez's playful, anti-humanist films and Sarah Evans' backlit colour transparencies examine the increasingly fraught and complex relationship between humanity and nature. Doris Vanistendael isn't so worried. Her videos and prints use the modernist grid to gaze impassively at planes drifting through a clear blue sky or a rustling canopy of horse-chestnut leaves.

Patrick Kelly and Joe Duggan both use colour photography to depict their own contemporary utopias. But the viewer might not feel as comfortable as the pictures' protagonists appear to be in these self-enclosed visions of paradise. Shun-Lung Chung and Justin Coombes create dystopic visions of the city. Chung punctuates his seductive, large-format urban pastorals with morbid, unexpected details. Coombes tells a photo-story in which a phantom's attempts to revitalise an inner-city wasteland are doomed to failure.

Katy Dawkins' posters place graffiti into an authoritative arena, exploring the contrast between 'official' and 'unofficial' language. Marc Goodwin's digital collages reverse the move, blending corporate jargon, sweet wrappers and architectural photography to mimic and undermine the vacuity of advertising. Hala El Koussy makes a more personal play with language; her minimalist videos explore the problems and poetics of everyday communication.

Kerim Aytac subverts the Magnum tradition of street photography, using high contrast subjects and extreme perspectives to create monochrome abstractions; ghosts of street life. Evi Peroulaki's lush colour pictures have the opposite effect, elevating and aestheticizing the detritus of the urban sprawl; a crushed Coke can; a banana. Ilona Karwinska, Urzula Rapacka, and Tomas Stargardter use photography to put sophisticated spins on well-established modes of portraiture. Karwinska delicately depicts the intimacy of friendship. Rapacka uses the soft toys up for grabs in an archaic amusement arcade game as cyphers to explore innocent and horrific memories of childhood. Stargardter finds the exotic in subjects as diverse as patron saint celebrations in Nicaragua and body piercing in Brighton.

Tomas Stargardter

Marc Goodwin

The group is made up of recent graduates in photography from courses at Goldsmiths, Westminster, and the RCA. All work is very much for sale.

The exhibition is spread between Century and Mafuji Galleries, at either end of Kingsland Road.